alright well I committed exactly two lines of code that's enough productivity for a weekend let's go

I was like dang this menu music's really good and OH OKAY YEAH FINE

the first screen of the first tutorial helpfully explains that the dude in the center of the screen with the giant sword is the player character and the monsters on the edges are monsters

folks we are extremely playing a JRPG

oh man you can only move the camera by holding down a shift button and then using the d-pad

totally forgot about how wii games were all perpetually starved for input lmao

at least this one has the decency to not map critical functionality to directional arm flails

animation is maybe a bit of a step down from The Last Guardian

I promise I'm genuinely interested in this game and this isn't gonna be a dunk thread

but also for real though why is my boy's head so small

Incredibly normal conversation

nobody:

this guy:

gonna hazard a guess that "the plot of this videogame" is what would happen

thinkin about maybe going to the first quest objective in the game instead of spending another several hours talking to every single NPC in this starting town that's apparently bigger than skyrim

Honestly really weirded out by this UV work? Dude's jacket has higher texel density than his actual face

I mean the Wii was hardly a powerhouse but this is less a technical limitation than just... really poor use of resources?

started digging through FFXII screenshots to point out how they distribute polygon and texel density to draw the eye towards focal points and let less important areas get blurry/low-poly

realized I should probably just play this game instead of talking about FFXII more lmao

anyway cool I'm playing as the childhood friend anime girl now this game is instantly improved

please go away yard sale hulk hogan

that is very much not the sound effect I expected for anime girl jumping

"shulk" is a weird sort of... mouth sensation

shulk shulk shulk shulk shulk shulk shulk shulk shulk

s h u l k

"magic sword that can kill magic robots, but inexplicably passes through humans without harming them" is a pretty neat macguffin concept

Chekov's Sword's Mysterious Inability to Harm Humans

YOOOO EQUIPPING DIFFERENT ARMOR ACTUALLY CHANGES HOW THE CHARACTER MODELS LOOK

Been mentally replacing "Bionis" with "Bionicle" every time someone dumps Lore and I have encountered zero problems thus far

like yeah whatever we're all living on the continent-sized corpse of a dead robot god in the middle of an infinite ocean tell me something I don't know

so we got a big dramatic cutscene of the heroes boldly setting out on their journey of grim revenge

immediately a tutorial pops up informing me that I can Craft Gems now, and that I should go talk to the Gem Man who is 180 degrees behind me inside the town we heroically left

oh also the cute childhood friend girl got Extremely Fridged in order to make the protagonist sufficiently angry to kick off the plot, but she was only in the game for like two hours and I've seen nonzero fanart of her in the past so I'm assuming she's not actually dead

Thoroughly Refrigerated Anime Girl

also we went straight from "vowing revenge on the villain that burned my town" to "prophecies causing angst over whether free will and predestination can coexist, but also I will fight destiny to the death regardless"

this game is wasting absolutely zero time in Doing The JRPG

for the amount of effort Monolith put into their environment art, the camera sure makes it hard to see any of it

oh sweet it's that smash bros level that I don't like

This outfit currently provides the best available stats

having played Xenoblade Chronicles 2 before this one, my hottest take is that Break->Topple->Launch->Smash is dramatically cooler than Break->Topple->Daze

also 2's emphasis on using that sequence as a finisher on top of the elemental combo thing was EXTREMELY rad and I miss it

XC2's gurren-lagann-ass spiral system where every attack builds power for the next tier of even stronger attacks is seriously one of the best battle systems I've ever played

This game's combat feels mostly pretty rote so far? It's fun but even the flashy stuff like the QTEs for crits and the change-the-future thing still mostly boil down to "perform the exactly one correct action"

it's not bad but there's nothing as dynamic as 2's crazy combo graph

I'm like 14 hours in so it's possible they're going Full JRPG and just haven't revealed half the mechanics yet though lol

Riku is here

so upon @siegarettes urging I have obtained a Wii Classic Controller and YALL I CAN MOVE THE CHARACTER AND THE CAMERA AT THE SAME TIME NOW IT'S LIKE I'M PLAYING A REAL VIDEOGAME

goodness what a horrendously uncomfortable controller

what if the left joycon had two sticks a centimeter apart

Hey is there any reason I should keep Dunban in my party? He is an insufferable clod who sucks

Inactive characters still get XP so he won't be underpowered but I dunno if there's some kind of critical thing that requires I max out his Affinity or something

(the thing with JRPGs is you can never tell ahead of time which stats are irrelevant and which ones will have an entire plot-critical boss battle designed around the assumption that you've been leveling them the entire game)

lmao what is this cinematography

honestly love the weird wooden puppeteering aesthetic that manifests in pretty much every 3D game's less-important cutscenes. Can't afford bespoke animations for every scene so you just provide stage directions, essentially, and let the character controllers play it out

Important scenes get proper animations and camera work but the rest are basically a JSON file of command lists like
- Walk to this point
- Rotate to face this direction
- Enter conversation_idle_loop_A_02 anim state
- Play dialogue clip 0xAA03F1
[continue for like 200 lines]

Even in AAA infinibudget games you can still clearly see dialogue playing out this way; they've just got more polished facial animations and camera angles

Switching to a classic controller has been hilarious bc it's suddenly clear that the devs just actually designed the game for it and then went "oh wait how are we gonna staple this onto the wiimote/nunchuck layout"

It doesn't even use all the buttons on the classic controller but the wiimote has to load THREE different sets of commands onto the D-pad and use both nunchuck buttons as shift keys to access them lmao

well OBVIOUSLY it's not really dead because if the continent-sized god was already dead we wouldn't be able to kill it at the end of this game

the only real spoiler I know about the end of this game is that the final boss is the left half of some dude, bc you meet the right half of him in XC2 and he's like Sorry I'm kinda busy getting the left half of my ass kicked by some teens on a wii

"giant structures in the sky obscured by clouds and haze" is always an extremely powerful aesthetic and this game does a very good job at it

Update: I gave two wolf hides to a child and he constructed a housing development?

why doesn't shulk have a chin or a nose

why does our boy look like a balloon with anime on it

like,

honestly respect the smash bros artists for just outright refusing to make shulk's face look anything his original model

you/guy she says not to etc etc

honestly wish I had more interesting things to say about this game but to be honest it's... not very interesting?

I'm 30 hours in and basically nothing has happened either in terms of plot or game mechanics :/

Combat's just a really bare-bones MMO-style skill clicker. Has a bunch of mechanics around skill interactions and party composition but provides absolutely zero incentive to use any of it bc all it accomplishes is maybe killing mooks 5% faster

Plot SEEMS like it's going somewhere interesting but the utterly glacial pacing is really eroding my willingness to keep caring

basically every single cutscene is setting up some kind of mystery and/or foreboding, but like... you can't just do 30 straight hours of portent man

Environments are super pretty at least

(although way too sprawling, which, again, pacing)

XC2 was a slow burn but eventually became one of my all-time fav JRPGs, so I keep hoping this one's eventually going to redeem itself, but... that hope is dwindling

oh no there's a hamster party member who's even more irritating than the one from XC2

I don't understand why this game keeps giving me new party members that are just plainly inferior to the tank-heal-DPS triangle it started with?

Like maybe I'm not trying hard enough to experiment with the deeper systems but the game sure isn't giving me any incentive to do so

still pretty tho

we got elves now and guess what: they're racist

Usually NPCs only fade in a few feet from the camera but this cutscene made a crowd out of billboards and it does a really cool job conveying a proper sense of scale

didn't get screenshots so I gotta paraphrase, but there was some absolutely mind-blowingly bizarre dialogue that I've been thinking about basically all day lol

context: one of your party members is an old hero who saved all of humanity in a war a few years before the start of the game

eventually you encounter Powerful Boring Elves, and in a largely-unrelated conversation the Prince of the Boring Elf Empire says he's heard of hero dude

to which Hero Dude immediately replies WOW YOU SURE KNOW A LOT ABOUT A WAR YOU NEVER SHOWED UP TO

elfdude mumbles something about non-intervention and then Hero Dude is like "haha I'm just joking with you; I'm sure you guys had a good reason"

this is then casually laughed off as playful banter

and I'm just like... ???????????????

this dude just straight-up obliterating elfprince halfway through a seemingly cordial conversation was literally the snappiest piece of dialog in the entire game, AND did more world-building in a single line than the preceding 40 hours of monologues about destiny or whatever??

and then they just... negate it?? It wasn't SUPPOSED to be worldbuilding or character insight or anything, it was just an incredibly poorly-executed attempt at writing anime-cool-dude banter???

why would

aaaaaaa

nobody in this game has a personality because all the dialog is just Mysterious Portent or bland exchanges of bromides about the power of friendship and/or destiny and/or justice, with awkward FFX-style two-second pauses between every line

and then the first time anyone actually says something unexpected and interesting, it's by accident??

why are JRPGs

this game doesn't even use motion controls so I'm honestly kind of impressed at our boy here somehow managing to smash his furniture and simultaneously deck pedestrians playing Xenoblade Chronicles

Monolith clearly learned an important lesson between this game and Xenoblade Chronicles 2, which is that if you're going to make the entire plot about a magical sword of destiny, it is critically important that that sword also be a cute anime girl

Another classic JRPG move:
- Big Reveal happens. Everyone is shocked and filled with determination
- Several hours later the Big Reveal is mentioned again, and everyone is again shocked and declares their determination to do whatever it was they already decided to do hours ago

so if you didn't play Xenoblade and were wondering why Shulk gets an underpants model in Smash, it's due to what I can only describe as a design joke in this game

unlike most JRPGs, weapons/armor actually have unique models. There are also "swimming oils" which take up an armor slot but leave the character unclothed

you'd expect this to be a one-off cosmetic thing, but actually they're fairly common drops and often have legit good stats

so depending on your luck with drops, the best available stats occasionally involve Shulk (or anyone else) wearing a suit of sci-fi plate armor, but with boxer briefs instead of cuisses

I can only assume this is intentional silliness on the part of the designers

Fun fact: If you stay on the title screen reading twitter instead of loading your save, it goes through an extremely pretty day/night cycle

"And then everybody fell off a really big cliff" is a top-tier JRPG writing device

usually you do it right after a big plot-critical boss encounter, so you get to teleport the whole party to a new location for free, immediately drop the story tension back to "wandering around," AND do a bunch of exposition via weird dreams while everybody's unconscious

shoutouts to Tales of Vesperia for featuring probably the most mind-blowing example of this particular story beat

it's seriously in just about every JRPG ever made though lol (often multiple times)

Shulk
ROBOT GF

very cool robot armor design tbh

seriously love seeing all those shiny speculars and reflective bits just painted straight into the textures

the game SUPPORTS cubemaps; they use them for shiny stuff like crystals etc, but never on the actual characters

In other Maximum JRPG news, it spawned two (2) enemies in a cutscene and the protagonist shouted "No! We're surrounded!"

this game seems to be getting really good around hour 55 or so which is possibly the stupidest thing I've ever said

A remarkable detail of this game's setting is that the only people with guns are... medics? Everybody attacks with swords or magic lasers but healers have actual literal guns that they shoot their friends with for some reason

there was, like, the barest shred of a sentence that sort of vaguely gestured towards a Lore Explanation for this but it's p clear that no one was particularly interested in justifying it; it's just Cool

so it was established at the very beginning that "everything in the world is made from ether"

all the magic stuff like healing guns and sword lasers and pyromancy is explained as "ether manipulation"

this is like if you asked me how cell phones work and I answered "Molecules"

There's a boss battle that you're supposed to lose for plot reasons, but I'm super over-leveled for the story quests at this point, so I just took out half its HP with no problems and then it jumped to a cutscene of the whole party lying KO'd on the floor

just spent like 10 minutes on a quest that was supposed to create a special weapon for one of the characters, and the result is.... a normal sword with entirely unremarkable stats, which I already had because it was already in the drop table for this area to begin with

Happy to report that the actual plot has now started

I swear this isn't a shitpost a character just dramatically proclaimed himself "DICKSON OF THE TRINITY"

apart from being excruciatingly slow-moving this is actually a very cool plot

lmao I love JRPG dialog so much

Everyone heroically decides to do some heroics and then each of the characters in turn say something heroic like
"Yeah, let's do it!"
"We'll save everyone!"
"We won't give up!"

and then the last one just says
"Shulk!"

extremely reminiscent of KH3's Peak JRPG Dialogue

[xigbar appears]
donald: "Go away!"
goofy: "No Organization!"
sora: "You're Xigbar!"

do you think anyone has managed to see the end of this game

does it even have one

what if there are ppl still playing since 2010 and the plot's just still going

we're inside a god and there's a type of enemy called a "selua" and they're essentially giant microbes and I'm DEEPLY worried that the unbelievably British localization team intended this as a pun on "cellular"

more like localisation team lmaooooo

Every Single Videogame Ever Made (1958-current)

welp the final boss is insanely overpowered despite literally every preceding main-quest boss fight being completely trivial :/

okay I finished the stupidly long videogame

that was... a hilariously straightforward KILL GOD TO SEIZE FREE WILL conclusion even by JRPG standards

The plot has a whole lot of legitimately cool twists and really creative worldbuilding and it honestly feels completely wasted on such a formulaic climax?

like you didn't need 90 hours tell me DIVINE PREORDINATION SUCKS, particularly after older games like like FFX basically START from that premise and then go wild exploring its implications

like why'd you spend all that effort on the incredibly unique and creative "human civilization trying not to go extinct while climbing around the body of a continent-sized robot currently engaged in sword fights" premise if you were just setting up "there's a god and he's a jerk"

:(

Having played XC2 first, most of the big Lore Revelations that connect the two games seem to work just as well in reverse

stuff like "why does Malos have a Monado" seem like equally interesting questions regardless of which game you played first

honestly if you were remotely interested in these games I'd say just play 2

it's not without its own flaws but IMO it's much more enjoyable to actually PLAY than this one was. This was like 90 hours and felt like it was about 3x too long, and 2 was like 80 but stayed fun

Hot takes:
1's overall plot is better than 2's, despite a weak conclusion

2's character writing is WAY better; well-realized development arcs and super fun dialogue between everyone

1's environment design is incredible; definitely the highlight of the game. It gets a TON of mileage out of the core premise of a world built on humanoid giants. Does tons of the Dark Souls thing where you're constantly finding new unexpected perspectives on familiar locations

2's environments aren't nearly as strong IMO. They're still extremely pretty and fun to explore, but they're nowhere near as structurally interesting. Not bad but doesn't really live up to the first game

Biggest issue for me is combat. Went into this already earlier in the thread, but 1's combat is boring and tedious and never stops being boring and tedious and for a 90-hr game that's... rough

2's got one of the best combat systems I've ever played (despite a REALLY slow start)

so yeah

Xenoblade Chronicles

it's p okay

very much a "for fans of the genre" thing; if you're not super excited about the stuff it does well you're gonna get extremely turned off by the stuff it does badly

the stuff it does well is very cool though